Democrat Congressional Committee Demands Google Bury “Climate Misinformation”

House Dems Unfurl Climate-Tinged Infrastructure Plan

Babylon Bee.

Sounds about right.

I have no idea what ‘avocado toast’ might be, but it sounds Communist.

CNN, always on the forefront of what’s Really Important.

Grievance Studies Majors and Social Justice Warriors might; actual People do not.

Read it.

Looks as if we have a living wall that Mexico has paid for.

Read it.

This continued trend has elicited howls of protest from union supporters who, of course, want to see an increase in union membership. It has also led several Democratic presidential candidates to make calls to reconfigure labor law. Bernie Sanders wants to double union membership and give federal workers the right to strike, as well as ban at-will contracts of employment, so that any dismissal could be subject to litigation under a “for cause” standard. Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren wants to make it illegal for firms to hire permanent replacements for striking workers. They are joined by Pete Buttigieg in demanding a change in federal labor law so that states may no longer pass right-to-work laws that insulate workers from the requirement to pay union dues in unionized firms. All of these new devices are proven job killers.

Epstein is currently the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law and director of the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

“Public opinion is an effect, not a cause. Told the same story, most people will have the same opinion. Story drives opinion; opinion drives action. There, I saved you a whole Walter Lippmann book. And as Voltaire said: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

— Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)

Kevin Williamson takes a break from pissing on Trump to do some actual writing.

There is a maxim in regulatory affairs holding that “complexity is a subsidy.” For example, the complexity of the tax code is a subsidy for big businesses that can afford to employ large teams of tax attorneys. Complexity in government is a subsidy for lobbyists and their employers, disadvantaging relatively small firms and upstarts that do not have, e.g., General Electric’s operation in Washington. Complexity in the legal system is a subsidy for lawyers and for people who can afford good lawyers, which is one of the reasons rich people so often enjoy better outcomes in criminal cases than poor people.

Complexity is a subsidy for bureaucracies, too, a way of offloading work from the bureaucrats onto the populations they are in theory intended to serve. That’s the DMV model of public service.

But often the populations bureaucracies are supposed to serve are not very well equipped to do the bureaucracies’ work for them. I know we’re supposed to studiously avoid such patronizing thoughts, but you don’t usually end up in a welfare office because you’re doing awesome at life right at that moment. Many of our social programs are explicitly directed at people with reduced capacities — children, sick people, old people, etc. Using bureaucratic complexity to keep the welfare rolls down is underhanded. It would be better to be more honest about our intentions.

This complexity is not ‘intentional’, of course, despite Kevin’s indulgence in Conspiracy Theory. Never ascribe to malevolence what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Still, let us be thankful for small blessings that save the taxpayer money.

Steve Sailer.

This is the future of the American workplace: endless meetings in which Persons of Color get incoherently emotional.

You can see why tech companies are letting Indians take over their firms: diversity is not working, so creeping racial monopolization by somebody who feels zero white guilt at least might get some work done.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #396

Is “Green” Energy a Ponzi Scheme?

House Republicans caught between Trump and young voters on climate change

Burning Trees For Heating Won’t Help With Climate Change: UK Think Tank

Do alarmists know the difference between weather and climate?  Doubtful.

While Microsoft Was Making Its Climate Pledge, Was Sponsoring an Oil Conference  The swine.

DC Solar Owners Plead Guilty to Largest Ponzi Scheme in Eastern California History

CNN Slams Republicans ‘Avoiding Uncomfortable Facts’ on Impeachment by Watching Fox News

AlSparks: Greta Thunberg: Little Tyrant?

Bottled Water Company Admits Dumping Deadly Arsenic Into CA’s Ecosystem… Nobody Goes To Jail

Enviro Activist Berates Hickenlooper For Once Suing To Prevent A Colorado Town From Banning Fracking I don’t know who this Hickenlooper is but I like him already.

Distinctive wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux could be lost forever, as climate change forces grape change  ‘could’

Whether he is alive or whether he is dead makes not a shred of difference to me or my life.

Not. One. Shred.

Nor to you, I suspect.

Moral: Do not let the shouting in the streets distract you from what is important TO YOU.

Relevant Ancient Wisdom: “Cobbler, stick to your last.’

I am far more interested in what the government is doing in response to this Chinese virus threat.

So far as I can see, that is exactly NOTHING.

Are they closing the airports to flights from China or carrying people from China who might have this virus? NO.

Aren they closing the ports to shipments from China or carrying people from China who might have this virus? NO.

WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING JOKE IS A SO-CALLED TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION THAT IS NOT CHECKING EACH AND EVERY PERSON ARRIVING IN THE UNITED STATES WHO MIGHT BE CARRYING THIS VIRUS?  The worst kind.

Nancy Pelosi and Pencil-Neck Schiff are Congresscritters from California. Are they working to make sure that California is safe from a potential pandemic? No, they’re too busy trying to lynch Trump.

Your tax dollars at work.

</rant>

Read it.

Hey — priorities, man.

Steve Sailer.

Apparently some Toxic Masculinity is more equal than others.

Jakarta is not an Exemplar of Sea Level Rise

Fury after Prince Charles flew 16,000 miles in private jets before climate change lecture

Gardens will look completely different in 20 years time as pests are out of control, Gardeners’ World presenter warns

A Surge of New Plastic Is About to Hit the Planet

Climate-friendly food choices protect the planet, promote health, reduce health costs

UK Climate Assembly: What is more Eco-Friendly, British Beef or Avocados?

The Guardian: Aussie Climate Skeptics are Self Hating Cowards

Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C  Betcha it’s not.

University offers students struggling with anxiety about climate change THERAPY to tackle their feelings of ‘anger, guilt and grief’

Read it.

Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages.

I have a Ring doorbell, and my problem with it is that it is too slow — by the time the video comes up on my computer screen, the person on the porch has decided that there is nobody home and has wandered off.

More than 500 police departments have partnered with the company, gaining access to a service called Neighbors Portal, which allows users to “ask Ring to request video footage from device owners who are in the area of an active investigation,” according to the company. (This footage is often shared by law enforcement with media organizations for broadcast segments.) Some police departments assist in marketing Ring devices to local citizens, in some cases offering government-subsidized discounts, according to documents obtained by Vice.

Got no problem with that. Cops want my video, they’re welcome to it. Wish there were some way I could send it to them automatically with a complaint. Maybe next year.

Ring’s efforts to court law enforcement have drawn scrutiny from civil-rights organizations for violating the privacy of users and the subjects of their recordings, and for encouraging profiling by race.

Once you step on my property, you got no privacy. If you don’t want to be ‘racially profiled’, don’t belong to a race that has a high crime rate … or move to Chicago.

Read it.

An Australian bookstore has urged a “dating coaching” company to stop sending clients to their store to practice “pickup” tactics.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

group of protesters set alight on Sunday the lobby of a newly built residential building in Hong Kong that authorities planned to use as a quarantine facility, as public fears in the financial hub about the coronavirus outbreak intensified.

John Hinderaker at Power Line looks behind the curtain.

From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else–someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with “modern” intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the future that the U.S. needed to imitate. In each case, the point was that we had to shed our archaic freedoms and enter the brave new world of central planning under the control–benign, of course!–of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Strangely, however, American free enterprise has managed to outlast and surpass all of those supposedly more advanced challengers.

Most recently, China has been the favored nation of the future. It has the advantage over Germany and Japan of being straightforwardly authoritarian (if no longer exactly Communist), which endeared it to anti-democratic liberals like Tom Friedman. Thus, liberals have eagerly calculated the future time when China’s GDP–or alleged GDP, as dictatorships have always been better at producing statistics than goods and services–would surpass ours. Given that China has three times our population, that would not seem to be a signal accomplishment. Nevertheless, liberals looked forward to it.

U.S. Government continues to dump funds into an electrical sinkhole

Climate Racism? Black Climate Activist Cropped from Greta Photo

CLAIM: Climate Change Cited for Penguin Decline

Mexican conservationist feared murdered by illegal loggers

Citizens Assembly lets public consider how UK should meet climate change goals  Another self-appointed ‘watchdog’ group.

Read it.

n Israeli biological warfare expert claims a deadly coronovirus spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China’s secret biological weapons program, the Washington Times reported.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the only declared site in China capable of working with the virus, the news outlet’s national security correspondent Bill Gertz wrote.

Apple TV+ is close to picking up a Scott Z. Burns climate change series

Billionaires who made their fortunes by trying to stop climate change

Real-life climate disasters are mirroring doomsday myths—and that’s worse than you think Popular ‘Science’.

Chris Cuomo Says Greta Thunberg Is Off Limits Because She’s A ‘Kid.’ Twitter Users Recall Some Recent CNN History

Nature Predicts Worsening Climate Driven Forest Fires – Burning What?

The West Is Burning! (Or Is It?)

German Language Police Group Decides To ‘UnWord’ The Term “Climate Hysteria”

Global warming could have a negative impact on biodiversity generation processes  I’m sure it would — if it existed.

EPA’s Andrew Wheeler Explains Why Activists Are Wrong To Blame Australian Wildfires On Climate Change

Read it.

Let me be the first then: Hunder Biden took a no-show job with a company that hoped to leverage influence with the sitting Vice President.

Both Hunter Biden and Joe Biden ought to be under DOJ investigation.

Victor Davis Hanson.

None of these decades-old rationales for Middle East intervention remain relevant today. The Cold War is over. China is using cash, not arms, to seduce Middle East regimes to lease out ports and facilities for its Belt and Road Initiative, an extravagant neo-imperial global project that grows ever more dubious in a strictly cost-to-benefit analysis, especially as China bogs down in a trade war with the United States and seems to be offering round-one concessions to try to end it. With a million Muslims in Chinese reeducation camps, and its clumsy diplomacy abroad, Beijing may eventually become as unpopular in Arab capitals as Moscow was during the Cold War.

I think that the question is not ‘Must America be in the Middle East?’ but rather ‘Must America linger in the Middle East?’.  Our technological superiority is such that if some development in the Middle East threatens an American interest, we can just go in and blow it all to Hell, kill the people who are causing the problem and then back off — no need for ‘boots on the ground’, just a demonstration that if you cross us you wind up dead, and we don’t care what form of government rules over the rubble.

Babylon Bee.

That would certainly save a lot of effort.

An answer that is occurring to many men nowadays.

Read it.

When someone picked up a handgun and turned it toward him, Smith reacted immediately.

In one swift motion, he knocked the gun away. Then he grabbed it, dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber, and replaced the magazine before handing it back.

Excellent.

California files lawsuit to remain a National Security Risk

Soros-Linked Group Joins MSM To Censor And Purge Climate Change Skeptics On YouTube

Want to stop climate change? Embrace the nuclear option.

Feminist Author Demands Germans Stop Having Babies To Save The Planet

Climate activist who climbed Big Ben has ‘Extinction Rebellion psychosis’, judge says

Climate change advisers call for steeper air travel tax to reforest country

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency – Jan 2020

Mnuchin Slams Greta Thunberg: ‘Who Is She’ to Give Economic Advice?

“Let’s Talk After She Finishes College” – Mnuchin Slams Greta Thunberg

Secret Science Under Attack — Part 2

Al Gore Compares Climate Change to 9/11 Attacks

Elizabeth Warren Demands Banks Provide Their Climate Disaster Plans  I’d like to see their Warren disaster plans.

Read it.

There must be clarity about the character of possible conflict with Iran. The flawed strategies applied over the last 19 years in Afghanistan and Iraq are not the answer to waging war with Iran. Those strategies involved deploying hundreds of thousands of ground forces in the region to conduct prolonged occupation, nation building, and counterinsurgency operations—none of which would be applicable to Iran. Rather, any action against Iran should be modeled after the decisive take-down of Iraq applied in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when aerospace power was used for 43 days. Only four days of that operation used ground forces to reoccupy Kuwait, and that will not be required in an Iranian effort. We have to stop equating strategy with the number of U.S. boots on the ground. Large numbers of U.S. ground forces in the Mideast plays into Iran’s hands and could lead to unnecessary and unwanted “endless wars.” Rapid accomplishment of desired effects should be the goal.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel.

In response, Israel planned a vast border barrier. The international community was outraged. The Israeli left called the idea nothing short of “apartheid.”

However, after the completion of the 440-mile border barrier — part concrete well, part wire fencing — suicide bombings and terrorist incursions into Israel declined to almost nil.

Read it.

In terms of seriousness, I realize that this question ranks right up there with “Why is There Air?” (which was a pretty funny comedy album from back in the 60s). There have been hundreds of books and articles which have examined the “roots of progressive rage.” At times I believe that we have seen so much progressive fury that we have almost become inured to it. Like most people, I usually adhere to the philosophy of “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and progressives gotta rant.” However, during the holiday season, I ran across two instances that caused me to re-examine my own thinking about our current social and political environment.

When I hear the word ‘triggering’ I reach for my revolver. (With apologies to Hermann Göring.)

Read it.

Let’s see whether anybody pays attention.

Read it.

Seventeenth-century scholars were horrified by how much ancient knowledge had been lost when the monasteries dispersed.

Read it.

“In a spirit of conciliation, the Legislature of West Virginia hereby extends an invitation to our fellow Virginians who wish to do so, to join us in our noble experiment of 156 years of separation from the government at Richmond; and, we extend an invitation to any constituent county or city of the Commonwealth of Virginia to be admitted to the body politic of the State of West Virginia,” HCR 8 read.

Joel Kotkin.

Despite an increasingly large lobbying and public relations effort, the oligarchs are in danger of squandering their once near universal political support. Some 70 percent of Americans, notes a recent Pew study, believe social media platforms “censor political views.” In California, just over the past year, the percentage of voters thinking tech firms need to be more heavily regulated has been rising to over 70 percent in both the Bay Area and Southern California.

Steve Sailer covers this stuff so you don’t have to.

Not that ‘woke’ women have any interest in men, of course….

Arctic sea ice can’t ‘bounce back’  More panic based on ‘climate models’.

Kiribati Man is Back: UN Rules Climate Refugees Cannot Be Rejected  Well, let’s see whether they can enforce that.

Summer Sea Ice Could End This Decade: The Voyage to the End of Ice

Judges Explain Why They Are Knocking Down Enviro Attempts To Sue Oil Companies Into Oblivion

Green Economy Is The New Black At Davos 2020  All abord the virtue-signaling train!

“I Don’t See Her In Beijing Or Delhi” – Niall Ferguson Slams Davos’ “Virtue Signaling” Greta Fanboys  They would use her for spare parts.

Prince Charles makes radical call for green taxes after flying to Davos on private jet

Read it.

I’m sure Gabbard’s impending suicide will be covered on the evening news.

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton Over ‘Russian Asset’ Remark

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Hits Hillary Clinton With $50 Million Defamation Suit

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton for Defaming Her as a “Russian Asset”

Read it.

So far as I can tell, not a parody. Although these days, you never know….

Read it.

Homes in 74% of the country, mostly the large metro areas, are unaffordable for the average worker. At least three-quarters of millennials will never own home as they’re drowning in student debt, auto loans, and credit card debt.

Renting has also become too costly for many in large metro areas like San Francisco. Millennials have already moved into campers and tent cities to escape rising rents, but there could be a new solution called “pod living.”

If they could live in a college dorm again, they would.

On the Climate Road to Serfdom

UN Panel Says Climate Refugees Can’t Be Returned Home

Davos Elites Warn “Climate Action Failure” Biggest Global Risk In 2020

The Green Swan: BIS Urges Climate Action to Prevent a new GFC

Ozone-depleting substances caused half of late 20th-century Arctic warming, says study

PBS Science Correspondent Blames Global Warming for Australian Wildfires  As they do.

Thunberg Calls Climate Change ‘Real Crisis’ in Davos Talk

‘Climate Puppet’ Greta Thunberg Shames Davos Attendees For ‘Doing Nothing’

Central Bankers’ Core Mission Now Includes Climate Change  Oh, really?

Read it.

Almost as good as a wall.

Zman does some ‘splainin’.

The white American Progressive has always imagined society as a fully enclosed community, that is judged as a whole. A popular slogan among them is that “society is judged by how it treats it weakest members.” This is an explicit expression of communal judgement, which is the traveling partner of communal salvation. The white Progressive looks at society as an organism that moves forward as a whole. If some parts lag behind, the whole thing slows to a halt.

Further, the white Progressive believes in the unitary reformer. That is, the reformer is not just focused on one area of society, but the whole of society. Even if their efforts are in one area, those efforts support the whole community. A reform effort that does not promise to move the whole of society forward is of no interest. For white Progressive reformers, society is the flock and they are the shepherds. Anything that threatens their effort to guard and guide the flock must be eliminated.

It is this spatial understanding of the world that helps explain these largely symbolic attacks on the Second Amendment. In the hive mind of the white Progressive, people who own guns are outside the domain of the righteous. Therefore, they must be marginalized from society. Much in the same way they anathematized smoking, white Progressives seek to make owning a gun disqualifying. Symbolically, these measures are aimed at putting gun rights outside the whole of society.